Junzhe Hu

PhD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Distributed Robotics Laboratory
Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / CV

About

I am a PhD student at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), advised by Prof. Daniela Rus. Previously, I received my M.S. in Robotics from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, where I was co-advised by Prof. Carmel Majidi and Prof. Zachary Manchester.

My research centers on embodied intelligence for robotic systems operating in complex environments. I develop bio-inspired robots, differentiable physics-based models, and adaptive control and learning methods to study how morphology, physical properties, and distributed sensing can be co-designed to produce intelligent behavior. I am particularly interested in aquatic and field robotics, fluid–robot interaction, and the role of body intelligence in shaping autonomy.

News

  • 2026.04Paper on Strongly-Coupled Fluid–Robot Multiphysics accepted at RSS 2026!
  • 2026.01Paper on Spatiotemporal Stiffness Modulation accepted at npj Robotics.
  • 2025.10Two workshop papers presented at CoRL 2025 — SwimGym and Unified Multiphysics.
  • 2025.07Paper on Aerial-Aquatic Robot accepted at IROS 2025 (Oral).
  • 2025.06Workshop paper on Unified Multiphysics Framework presented at ICRA 2025 Workshop.
  • 2025.05Paper on Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation under review at IEEE T-MI.
  • 2024.08Joined CMU Robotics Institute as a graduate research assistant.
  • 2024.05Awarded Best Capstone Project (1 / 130).
  • 2023.11Awarded Chinese National Scholarship (top 0.8%).
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Selected Publications

Full list →
RSS 2026 — Strongly-Coupled Fluid-Robot Multiphysics
Realizing Robotic Swimming with Strongly-Coupled Fluid–Robot Multiphysics Accepted
J. Hu*, J. H. Lee*, C. Majidi, Z. Manchester
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2026
Paper
npj Robotics — Spatiotemporal Stiffness Modulation
Spatiotemporal Stiffness Modulation for Efficient Aquatic Robot Locomotion Accepted
J. Hu, J. Lee, T. Wu, G. Sue, J. Liao, Z. Erickson, Z. Manchester, C. Majidi
npj Robotics, 2026
Paper
PNAS
Vortex-Induced Propulsion in Upstream Robotic Swimming Under Review
J. H. Lee*, J. Hu*, S. Kazi, M. Luhar, C. Majidi, Z. Manchester
PNAS (Under Review)
IROS 2025
A Novel Aerial-Aquatic Locomotion Robot with Variable Stiffness Propulsion Module Published
J. Hu, P. Chen, T. Feng, Y. Wen, K. Wu, J. Dong
IEEE IROS 2025 (Oral)
Paper Video
IEEE T-MI
Expanding and Rectifying Pseudo-Label Perturbation Space for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation Published
J. Hu, Y. Wen, E. Roussinova, M. Bouri
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging, 2025
Paper